Multicomponent Multimethod Assessment of Emotional Change in Psychotherapy Research: Initial Validation of a Neurobehavioral Paradigm

• DOI: 10.1007/s10862-025-10201-3
• Publication Date: 2025-02-14T05:15:33Z
• Authors: Loris Grandjean; Hélène Beuchat; Antonio Pascual-L...; Chantal Martin-So...; Bogdan Draganski; Ueli Kramer

Abstract Self-contempt and emotional arousal are two key concepts associated with psychological distress but have been little studied in a daily life context. This work explores the use of individualized self-contemptuous stimuli extracted from a self-critical two-chair dialogue into an fMRI scanner. 28 female controls participated in psychological investigations (at three time points) and a self-critical emotion-eliciting two-chair dialogue followed by an fMRI assessment. We observed the neurofunctional activation during this task and compared neural activation during the exposition to self-critical individualized stimuli versus negative non-individualized stimuli. We also investigated emotional arousal change during the psychological session. The fMRI data analysis showed no significant difference in activation between the first and second fMRI assessments. We found no significant activation when comparing the neural activation between the exposition to self-contemptuous individualized stimuli and non-individualized negative stimuli. Controls do show an increased self-reported emotional arousal when expressing self-contempt. Our neurobehavioral design seems promising as proof of concept in combining an analogue psychotherapy session and an fMRI session to investigate expressed self-contempt and emotional arousal in healthy controls. Using this design in clinical populations seems feasible and may be important in clinical populations known for emotional difficulties such as BPD.